The Islamic State’s destabilization of the Middle East has made strange bedfellows of various regional powers and forces us to confront a series of uncanny scenarios: the Iranian and Saudi sponsorship of the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel over the summer of 2014; Iran and Saudi Arabia’s secret meetings to discuss possibilities for dissolving the Caliphate; US covert operations to arm Syrian “rebels,” comprised primarily of jihadist, not secular, elements; and President Obama’s decision to bomb the Islamic State’s strongholds in Syria with the backing of a grand coalition of Western and Arab states but no UN mandate, to name just a few. The most surprising development of all, however, is not found among these strange alliances, but rather in the staggeringly successful nation-building of these armed and seemingly backward insurgents, as compared with the dismal nation-building attempts of the United States.
The United States has been at war nearly continuously since Vietnam—for more than half a century. It has done so, in its own words, “to spread democracy.” Following a repetitious cycle of wars varying from “full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again,”90 the US military has produced less than encouraging results, especially in Iraq. How can we forget that the Americans captured and recaptured Mosul to annihilate the jihadists? They fought for Fallujah twice with heavy losses. Yet, when Bush and Blair’s armies pulled out of Iraq, they came home “victorious.”91 At the time of this writing, however, both cities are under the rule of the Caliphate.
In sharp contrast to the US military, with its high-tech propaganda and seductive mythology, the Islamic State has waged a successful war of conquest using terrorist tactics—a war fought under the ideological banner of jihad, a holy war. If military superiority cannot guarantee victory, as the many US defeats of the last fifty years suggest, the key to military success must lie elsewhere. This warrants an examination of the motivations of the armies of the US and IS.
Both militaries justify their actions with an appeal to a larger cause. This begs the question: Is the promise of a radical Salafist state whose borders trace those of the ancient Caliphate a more powerful motivation than the will to “spread democracy,” in the process incidentally paving the way for market colonization by Western multinationals? Judging from what we have seen in the last eleven years, the correct answer may well be yes. If al Baghdadi’s holy war is indeed a more powerful motivator than the exportation of Western democracy, it becomes imperative to understand what type of conflict he is waging.
Developed after the death of the Prophet Mohammed by the Ulema (the global community of Muslim religious scholars), jihad was an elaboration of the teachings of the Koran and of the Prophet. However, there are two types of jihad: the great jihad, which is mostly spiritual, that is, the daily fight of each individual against his or her temptations; and the small jihad, the physical fight against an enemy. What interests us here is this latter type, whose concept has evolved through the centuries, while the great jihad has remained unchanged.
Formulated when Islam was already a superpower, the idea of the small jihad reflected an imperial spirit. It was a tool to protect the community of believers. Religious scholars of this period further distinguish two forms of small jihad: defensive and offensive. The former was the obligation of all members of the community to take up arms against the enemy to safeguard Islam. The offensive jihad, on the other hand, could be called only by the Caliph, the ruler of the community. Its task was to spread Islam, not to protect it. The jihad that the Islamic State is waging falls into both of these categories.
As long as the Caliph had sufficient warriors ready for combat, the citizen was exempt from being drafted in the offensive jihad. But when more soldiers were needed, no true Muslim could ignore the call of their spiritual and political leader. This principle is still in place today. Thus, al Baghdadi, as the legitimate successor of the Prophet Mohammed, not only has the right to wage wars of conquest, but can demand the participation of all Muslims in these conflicts, as well as demand their migration to the Caliphate. “Those who can immigrate to the Islamic State should immigrate, as immigration to the house of Islam is a duty,”92 al Baghdadi declared in his proclamation of the Caliphate.
It follows that the advent of the modern Caliphate undermines the authority of any other jihadist organizations or rulers. Potentially, the Islamic State represents a challenge to the legitimacy of all Muslim governments, because it imposes the authority of the Caliph on them.93 This claim should not be dismissed when assessing the type of threat that the Caliphate poses, both to Muslims and to the rest of the world. Indeed, one of the tasks of the grand coalition that President Obama promoted under the umbrella of NATO, with the active participation of several Muslim states, in September 2014, is to prevent the Islamic State’s further territorial expansion in the region.
In jihadist chat rooms and Twitter messages, supporters of the Islamic State maintain that the US and the British strategy of not negotiating for the release of their hostages, who they know will be beheaded, is aimed at stirring up public fear. Once incited, such fear may create a domestic political climate that supports military action, as happened in 2003. Only this time, the attack would aim to protect Western allies in the region, namely the Saudis and other Gulf state elites, from the revolutionary message of Caliphate, which could indeed stir a revolution inside these nations.
As imperial Islam faded, the “small jihad” assumed new meanings, adapted to the needs of the time. Faced with the uncompromising violence of the Franks in the Second Crusade, Saladin, the Abuyyid Sultan of Egypt and Syria, redefined the concept of small jihad.94 The radical spiritual resources of Islam animated his followers in their successful campaign of re-conquest.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the memory of Saladin’s jihad became part of the Middle Eastern struggle for independence from the colonial powers of Europe. During the British domination of Egypt, Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, reshaped the jihad into an anti-colonial conflict, a fight for full independence from the British. A few decades later, Sayyed Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual, transformed it into a revolution, a vehicle for regime change.95
Since the late 1950s, the debate over the true meaning of modern jihad has revolved around three defining concepts: counter-Crusade, anti-colonial struggle, and revolution. The Islamic State seems to have incorporated all of these characteristics to give the small jihad an entirely new meaning: that is, nation-building. “Rush oh Muslims to your state,” al Baghdadi declared in his inaugural address as Caliph. “It is your state . . . This is my advice to you. If you hold to it you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills.”96
The counter-Crusade against Western culture and interests in the Middle East, as expressed through the alliance between corrupted Muslim elites and Western powers, prepared the ground for the traditional war of conquest waged by al Baghdadi. Nation-building in the conquered territories also requires regime change—hence the revolutionary nature of al Baghdadi’s fight in Syria and Iraq, countries ruled by corrupted elites at the service of foreign powers. But what makes this modern jihad particularly powerful among Muslims is the fact that it has, in a relatively short time, actually succeeded in achieving some measure of nation-building.
Al Qaeda has accomplished nothing close to the birth of the Caliphate, and has never actively engaged in nation-building. Rather, its leadership was too busy plotting to attack America. “Al Qaeda is an organization and we are a state,” explained an Islamic State fighter, who gave his name as Abu Omar, in an online chat with the New York Times.97 This statement perfectly summarizes the different roles that the two armed groups play in the eyes of many Muslims and the distinctive challenge that each poses to the world.
According to this analysis, 9/11 was a punch in the face of the West, while the establishment of the Caliphate is a knock-out blow to its key Middle Eastern allies, a blow that threatens the very existence of a geopolitical order originally designed to benefit the west and its oligarchic friendly elites. This may come as a surprise to Westerners, but it should not surprise those who rule the Middle East. Soon after 9/11, the head of Saudi General Intelligence told the man in charge of the British Secret Intelligence Service, the MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, “9/11 is a mere pinprick on the West. In the medium term, it is nothing more than a series of personal tragedies. What these terrorists want is to destroy the House of Saud and remake the Middle East.”98 Dearlove, then, was presented with a chilling prophecy that the Islamic State is attempting to prove true.
It was only a matter of time before a jihadist armed organization would challenge the Middle Eastern establishment, reformulating ancient concepts in modern terms. Only a matter of time before an armed group would flesh out the ultimate Muslim utopia, the new Caliphate, and present it to millions of Sunnis as a feasible plan of action using the tools of modern propaganda. In the eyes of many Muslims, the Islamic State, like its predecessors, is nothing more than the product of decades of abuse, corruption, and injustice. But unlike its predecessors, IS has adapted to a newly multipolar geopolitical environment and undertaken a pragmatic approach to the populations living in its territory.
The sensitivity to domestic issues, as well as its endogenous characteristics, are equally part of the appeal that the Islamic State exercises. In sharp contrast, al Qaeda has always been perceived as a foreign power, something that al Badhdadi attempted to avoid when in 2010 he changed the name of his group from al Qaeda in Iraq back to the Islamic State in Iraq. Indeed, when al Qaeda came to be resented in the Middle East, it was not because the organization was run by a Saudi billionaire and an Egyptian intellectual, both totally removed from the day to day lives of most Muslims, but rather because the organization had chosen to take the jihad out of the Middle East.
It is unquestionable that the events of 9/11 opened up a second front, against the far away enemy, the United States, away from the refugee camps, out of the daily suffering of the Middle Eastern people and away from the injustice that the corrupted Arab regimes perpetrated upon them. Moreover, 9/11 was an attack that few within the jihadist community approved. Lodged in the heart of the US with the intent to weaken America’s power and deprive the ruling oligarchies of the Middle East of its support, the attack, in the Western media, came to symbolize the jihad. Though some in the Middle East cheered at the collapse of the Twin Towers, the regional consensus had in fact been that nothing good could come of such tactics. On the contrary, taking the fight so far away might have disastrous consequences at home. And indeed it did.
In retrospect, the absurdity of attacking the far away enemy is obvious. But Osama bin Laden had the means to mastermind 9/11 at a time when other jihadists could barely make ends meet. Today, things are very different. While the Islamic State runs the Caliphate on the historical soil of Islam, the historical nucleus of al Qaeda has been destroyed. Bin Laden is dead, and the organization he founded has been reduced to a generic jihadist logo.
Al Baghdadi’s nation-building effort in Syria and Iraq is a powerful draw in part because of where it is located. Geography has always been essential for Islam, both religiously and politically. In a CNN documentary, a smuggler of foreign fighters across the Southern Turkish border near Hatay explains what some of these men feel when entering Syria. “For many, the crossing itself is a religious experience. When they get to the fence, they kneel and cry, they weep, like they’ve just met something more precious to them than their own family. They believe this land, Syria, is where God’s judgment will come to pass.”99
The cultural impact of the old Caliphate upon the territory it controlled was massive, to the extent that today, centuries after the disintegration of this splendid culture, a common language across the Middle East and North Africa still exists. Equally, the fall of the Caliphate spurred centuries of conquest and humiliation, and carved deep scars in the identity and self-esteem of the Muslim population. When the Europeans redrew the map of this historic and ancient territory, these wounds reopened. Time and time again, since the eleventh century, every movement of Muslim rebirth has nurtured the deeply nostalgic dream of recreating the old boundaries of the Caliphate, as if recomposing its geography could magically recreate its splendor.
Geography is also at the root of the most recent radicalization of the Salafist movement, out of which both al Baghdadi’s and al Zarqawi’s visions of jihad took shape. What triggered this radicalization was the signing of a peace agreement between the Jordanian government and Israel in 1994, regarded by many as an extraordinary event. The agreement represents the official acknowledgement of the geographical right of Israel to exist in a land considered part of the Caliphate. Its signing was a watershed for the jihadist movement, triggering the birth of a new wave of clandestine Salafist organizations, among them the Jordanian al Tawhid.